Understanding Baryta carb.

Dr. Claudio C. Araujo M.D., F.F.Hom. (Lon.) et al.

Kent affirms that the Bar-c. patient suffers from “dwarfishness” not physical, but a mental enfeeblement.

There is a doubt left from our forefathers unsolved: Is he really mentally handicapped (since birth) or he deeply believes he is and as a consequence he turns himself into someone with intellectual disabilities?

We believe – hypothetically - that it’s an impression. And from that impression he turns his life as if he was someone incapable to perform the most common daily activities.

He will not be able to perform the mot simplest duties like walking, talking, learn how to read and write. He learns his lesson but only to forget the next day.

We believe that Bar-c. starting point lies in this sensation:

 

Imagines he walks on his knees. 

It’s a very deep and subjective sensation. One can suppose what is coming out of it: the feeling of being handicapped, coupled with a sense of humbleness or even humiliation. 

Is he feeling himself in the presence of a superior being, or a master or a noble man from whom he deserves obedience? But again, why? Why is he feeling servile and inferior?

Why are all the other human beings superior, why he needs to be at his knees?

Walking in street she imagines men are laughing at her, criticizing to disadvantage; this makes her so timid that she daren’t look up or at anybody, and she perspires over whole body. 

That’s the way Bar-c. imagines the world and how the people around sees him: he is in disadvantage.

People around already knows it and laugh on him.

What are his disadvantages?

As we could see, “mental dwarfishness” is what we must look for. That’s probably the way he first imagined himself and it’s now the way he is.

Can we assume that he is now mentally retarded or has problems at school because in his deep conscience he believed he is less than the others?

Now we know why Bar-c. wants to hide himself from the others. He is ashamed of himself, of his imagined inferiority.

Bar-c. imagines that he is not able to perform his daily obligations, he got insecure and, as for certain, he will fail. Who doesn’t, carrying inside himself that feeling? If we don’t believe in our own resources, who may we succeed?

From that sensation, he is dejected and sad. Comparing himself to the others, how can he feels?

Dejected; he does not wish to speak, 

Sadness, dejection of spirits, grief over trifles. The proving describes his angry outburst, but even then, his angry outbursts are “coupled with cowardice”. Meaning that he has to backing up even at his own feelings of anger and frustration. He is walking on his knees, so how can he have his voice raised?

Sudden ebullitions of anger, but coupled with cowardice. 

Should we consider in this remedy the possibility of a strong sensation - of being mocked, isolated, laughed and persecuted?

He is irresolute, worried with his future, all those feelings coupled with anxiety and lack of resolution.

Let’s try to understand someone that believes himself unable to cope with all quests and difficulties in our daily lives. To cope with violence, to the constant changes of life, to illness, to deal with the loss of the loved beings, to the loss of love, affection – after all, that’s what life is all about.

He is mentally handicapped – or at least he believes he iA. and he will become, someday, the person he believes he is.

Bar-c. is frightened, irresolute and lacks self-confidence.

Our thesis is that those feelings are only the consequences of his first and deepest feelings – his impotence to face the world based on his supposed non-intellectual capabilities.

Groups in Baryta carb.

Humor

Loquacity.

Good humor becomes mischievousness. 

Anxious about most trivial affairs. 

Nervous anxiety, restlessness, desire to escape. 

 Anxious dreams almost every night, with restless sleep, [1]. 

Anxious dreams at night, with heaviness of the head in the morning, [1]. 

Anxious; evenings in bed; she feels obliged to open her clothes, [1]. 

Whining mood. 

Lachrymose at night,. 

Weeping mood. 

 

Dejected; he does not wish to speak, [1]. 

Suddenly becomes dejected in the evening, 

Sadness, dejection of spirits, grief over trifles. 

 

Great ennui and ill-humor. 

Peevish and quarrelsome. 

Sudden ebullitions of anger, but coupled with cowardice. 

 

With Oneself

Imagines he walks on his knees. 

Hopelessness; distrust. 

Walking in street she imagines men are laughing at her, criticizing to disadvantage; this makes her so timid that she dare not look up or at anybody, and she perspires over whole body. 

Despondent

Despondent and anxious,  

Extremely despondent and depressed; she believes that she must die; cries (seventh to tenth day),.

Solicitude: about his future; about domestic affairs. 

Irresolution

Irresolute, constantly changing his mind. 

The highest degree of irresoluteness; she proposes a little journey, but as soon as she makes preparation she changes her mind; she wavers between opposite resolutions; all self-confidence has disappeared; great timidity and cowardice.

Loss of self-confidence; desponding: pusillanimous. 

Great irresolution about small things; he wants to drink the cup of coffee, then again not; does not know what he shall do. 

Frightened

Very easily frightened; a little noise in street seems to her like cries of fire; it frightened her so that all her limbs trembled. 

Sad and fearful; he has all kinds of sad thoughts about his future state, and thinks that he 

Frightful dreams, on account of which she wakes in a sweat, 

Great fear and cowardice,. 

Kent: Like Caust., fear of something going to happen. Full of imaginations; imaginary cares and worries. Hatching up all sorts of complaints and grievances that may happen. A good deal like Ars. 

Thinking of one's complaints makes them worse. 

Kent: If he thinks about his troubles, his sufferings, they at once grow worse.

Towards the Others

Averse to strangers and company. 

A peculiar dread of men. 

Worse in company; better when alone. 

Dejection and dread of men, [7]*. [*In scrofulous children treated by Baryta]. 

She is suddenly overwhelmed with an evil apprehension; she imagines, for instance, that a beloved friend has suddenly fallen sick and is dying. 

With the Environment

Frightful dreams of fire and the like (after eight days),.

Work

Laziness, averse to bodily or mental labor. 

Kent: Premature old age and brain fag from prolonged mental work.

Childhood

Child does not want to play, but sits in corner doing nothing. 

Children are inattentive when studying 

Memory deficient; child cannot be taught, for it cannot remember; is inattentive. 

Dwarfishness

Kent: This remedy looks towards the development of the young. You will see in the text commonly expressed under this medicine, "dwarfishness."

That does not always mean small in stature as it is spoken of in this remedy. Dwarfishness in body and mind; mental dwarfishness, and dwarfishness of organs.

You realize what precocity means; young persons who are unusually brilliant; well advanced mentally. We say they are beyond their years. They are precocious.

Get this in mind first, and think what it means; and then in the Baryta carb. constitution, we have the very opposite state.

That is what we mean by dwarfishness. Children are late coming into usefulness; or activity; late with their studies; late learning to talk; late learning to read; late learning to make the combinations that enter into life; late learning to take in images, and form perceptions; to take on their activities; to do their work.

Late: We say sometimes that Calc. carb. is late in learning to walk, but Baryta carb. is also late learning to walk, although it has an entirely different cause.

To express it in a common, old-fashioned way, Baryta carb. is late learning how to walk, even with pretty good limbs. Calc. has miserable, weakly limbs, flabby muscles, poor bones, and hence he is late learning to walk.

"Late walking" is Calc.

"Late learning to walk" is Baryta carb.

It competes also with Borax and Natrum mur. All three of these medicines have a peculiar kind of tardiness in the development of the brain, so that they are late learning to do things; late in developing.

But Baryta carb. leads them all in this late coming into the activities and uses of life.

You will have patients to treat, where this slow development manifests itself in girls 18 to 25 years of age, who do the things they did when they were children, and say things as they said them when they were children.

"Childish manner of doing things, and childish behavior. Playing with dolls and saying foolish things."

They have not come into womanhood. They are late in taking on the activities and uses of the woman. They lack the prudence of the woman. They have not become circumspect, and say things just as a boy or just as a little girl would say them.

That is the dwarfishness of the mind. To appreciate that late development, and to see it in Baryta carb. from all of its symptoms and peculiar features, leads to a strong grasp of the remedy.

There is some of this found in such remedies as Graph., Sulph. and Calc., but nothing compared to this remedy. This seems to suspend the development that makes the child into a man or a woman.

It is not a small person that makes me think of Baryta carb., but the dwarfishness that is mental, and that is of organs.

When a child has almost any disease, measles, scarlet fever, mumps, or even a bad cold, or a malarial attack, the development ceases and dwarfishness results, a state in which he was not born, but a state that he has acquired, arrest of development.

It brings on emaciation and dwindling of the whole body, except the abdomen, which gradually enlarges. These are phases not to be overlooked in the very beginning, because the symptoms only help to establish this basis and these troubles and tissue changes come on as ultimates.

The Baryta carb. child will be seen hiding behind the furniture when strangers come in; will hide as for shame of something or as if afraid. It imagines all sorts of strange things, that it is talked about, or laughed at.

It does not seem to advance. It does not seem to do any good to teach it, for it does the same things over and over and remains untrained. They either cannot comprehend, or they cannot memorize, or they cannot maintain a thought, and you go over it and over it, and the mother wonders if that child is ever going to learn something, and the teacher reports that the child lacks capacity.

The teacher cannot comprehend it, the mother cannot comprehend it, but the homoeopathic physician should know all about it at once. If he knows his Materia Medica he should be well up in the development of a feeble child; those who are going towards rickets*, who are feeble, who are always depending on somebody, fitted only for menial places**.

*raquitismo

**trabalho ou ocupação servis

There is an expression here in the text,

"Want of clear consciousness."

Do we not see from what I have said, what that must mean in this remedy, and that it is different in this remedy from what it is in a good many others?

And yet if you had read that symptom first you would not have appreciated it.

"A want of clear consciousness."

When the Baryta carb. babies appear in the clinic they will keep the hand up over the face and peek out through the fingers.

Bashful. Timid. Easily frightened. Afraid of strangers. Other remedies have similar features, but it is a strong feature of this medicine. Withered face. Sickly countenance. It is the idea of hiding, the idea of timidity.

The child does not want to play, and it sits in the corner. Does not pay any attention to its hammer, if it is a boy; or its doll, if it is a girl. Sits and sits. Does not seem to be thinking; a lack of ability to think.

Children grow up without any distinctiveness, without any ability to perceive, and therefore fail to develop. Always borrowing trouble.

Children in a constant whining mood; always whining. Running through the complaints will be the sufferings of the parts, or the men symptoms.

"The more he thinks about the complaint the worse it gets."

Male Sexuality

Excessive nightly emissions. 

Emissions in a man, æt. 30, who never had the like. 

Erections only in morning before rising. 

Erections while riding. θ Impotence.

Erection in the morning before rising, which was seldom the case (after seventeen days)

Erection all night (thirtieth day), (secondary action), 

In the evening, sudden erections, more violent than for a year, with shivering and such desire that coition was necessary (after ten hours), 

Much increased sexual desire (secondary action), 

Profuse, nightly emissions shortly after coition (fourth day), 

Kent: Of the male sexual organs we have some strange features. This medicine takes away all sexual desire and ability, leaving the genitals relaxed, and in a state of impotency.

Diminished sexual desire and ability. 

Impotence.

Relaxed penis and premature emission. 

Emission in an old man, followed by feeling of dryness in whole body. 

Insufficient discharge of semen. 

Numbness of the genitals, for several minutes (after twenty-eight days 

Slow erection (ninth and fourteenth days), 

Diminished sexual desire, 

Falls asleep during coition, without emission of semen (twenty-first day), 

Several emissions follow each other in close succession (in a married man), followed by exhaustion (after thirty-five days), 

Female Sexuality

Talkative mania; < during catamenia; yellow complexion; white-coated tongue, with red edges, little ulcers on tongue; nausea without being able to vomit; fine skin becoming easily denuded. θ Young girls. 

Mania; talks much and confusedly; wants to go out of house. θ During pregnancy. 

Discharge of bloody mucus from the vagina, with anxious palpitation and restlessness of body, pain in the small of the back, weakness amounting to faintness,.

Increased desire for coition in women, which is more violent and lasting (curative action), 

Intellectual

Want of clear consciousness. θ Old age. 

Feels stupefied; as if benumbed; brain seems to move to and fro as if loose, when moving body. 

Weak memory. 

Forgets what was just said, just done, or what he was going to do or get. 

Forgetful; in middle of a speech the most familiar words fail him. 

(bar. a) As if absent; absentmindedness. θ Apoplexy. 

(bar. a) Has no clear perception. θ Apoplexy. 

Great mental and bodily weakness; childishness. θ Old people. 

*Great forgetfulness, so that he does not know what he has just spoken (after twenty-

seven days), [2].

Kent: Especially in old age has that been useful. It is not that confusion of mind that we know to be dizziness. But he is not clear in his intellect. We see how this medicine takes hold of the intellect. It takes hold of his memory. It begins with a feeble state, and it gradually travels toward imbecility.

You press it to its extreme and it has imbecility, and up to this we have degrees all along 

the line from the very beginning, from a mere matter of cloudiness in his thoughts to imbecility.

Another grand feature in this remedy is the application of these things to more advanced years. We say this is a childhood state, this is the state of youth and arrested development.

Now it does not matter whether we have this arrested development in youth, in childhood, or at the advanced age of fifty. From some strange circumstance, which we are not able to fathom, we say the individual is taking on the, appearance of old age.

Premature old age: We call it premature old age. Baryta carb. has cured lingering complaints that have resulted from malaria, overwork, mental or physical, prolonged mental strain, when the appearance of premature old age was a prominent feature.

Old age creeps upon him too soon. There is but little difference between childhood and old age, and hence old age is called second childhood; but we always regret to see a man under seventy becoming childish, and yet we do see many becoming simple and childish. It does not mean merely imbecility, but childlike behavior.

Doing and saying things like a child. So in premature old age these symptoms lead us to think of Baryta carb.

Neurological

Delirium, with frightful figures and images before eyes. 

Groaning and murmuring. θ Old age. 

Childish and thoughtless behavior. θ Old people. θ Apoplexy. 

Slight delirium and stupefaction at night, as in fever, 

Idiocy.